Educational Aims: Knowledge, Understanding and Skills

Psychology is an empirical science that aims to understand how and why humans and non-human animals act in the ways they do. The discipline spans studies of basic neural mechanisms to analyses of complex human relationships. Psychology's methods of enquiry have developed from philosophy, biology and other natural, social and mathematical sciences. Psychology is a broad subject area that attempts to analyse and explain behaviour in a systematic, reproducible way. There is a strong emphasis on the relationship between theory and empirical data, with results that have applications in education, health, industry and commerce and other situations.

Subject Specific: Knowledge, Understanding and Skills

In sum, the degree aims to:

Offer students a thorough grounding in key areas of contemporary psychology.

Provide students with the opportunity to study in depth important areas of psychology that are taught by staff who are research active in those areas.

Offer students a range of different learning environments and forms of assessment.

Enable students to formulate, investigate, analyse and evaluate psychological questions.

Give students the opportunity to acquire the intellectual and practical skills required for postgraduate study in psychology.

General: Knowledge, Understanding and Skills

Develop numeracy and analytic skills that can contribute to success in a range of future careers.

Develop students' skills when communicating in different formats, such as written reports and reviews, essays, posters, press releases, and oral presentations, and to communicate more effectively in general.

Enhance students' ability to work as part of a group on different kinds of problems.

Improve students' organisation of their time and their ability to work and learn independently.

Carry out empirical studies drawing on a variety of psychological methods

Use quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse data from psychological investigations.

Present and evaluate research findings.

Plan, conduct and report a substantial piece of independent empirical research including: defining a research problem, formulating testable predictions, choosing appropriate methods, planning and conducting data gathering, demonstrating an awareness of the ethical issues and codes of ethics, evaluating data, and producing a professional report.